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Monday, May 11, 2009

Symantec Support says WinPatrol is a Virus

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure to meet many other professionals who spend their time helping consumers protect their computers. Most of the time, my new friends work for companies which might be considered competitors. In consumer security there isn’t the same competition as other industry's. There’s mostly cooperation and friendship with others who came into the profession because of a sincere interest in helping.

Some of the bigger companies don’t have the same philosophy and have been known to pick on the little guys like me. In October 2006, WinPatrol users were letting me know that Symantec was telling them they had to remove WinPatrol to install Norton Internet Security. It turns out if you read the screen, it was only a recommendation but it was confusing and rude. I wasn’t the only victim, they recommended folks remove SpyBot Search & Destroy and others.

This week I was surprised to hear that a Symantec support rep actually told a customer that WinPatrol was a virus and during a remote assistance phone call they deleted WinPatrol from their system.

It appears WinPatrol had detected and removed a questionable file for the user and logged the action in our history file. Apparently, the mere mention of the filename in our history text file was enough for the Symantec rep to wipe out anything associated with WinPatrol. This wasn’t a false-positive caused by a new signature file. It was quick attempt by a support rep to dip into the pocket of an uneducated customer.

For their assistance Symantec charges its victim $99. Apparently Symantec is having tough economic times. They’ve even dishonored themselves by partnering with Ask.com to generate additional revenue at the expense of their customers.

Needless to say, this is unacceptable. The customer deserves a refund and an apology. I welcome appropriate action by anyone at Symantec interested in doing the right thing.

After being a confirmed Norton Utilities user since the 80's, I gave up on Symantec over five years ago after their bloated software brought my computer to its knees, with frequent, otherwise unexplained, crashes. Their customer support even then was a joke, being worse than none, if that's even possible!

I switched to ZoneAlarm and AVG and WinPatrol and haven't looked back!

Bill i've used WinPatrolas long as i remember & first thing i load on newmachine had a few since 95keep-up the good work had Norton but long gone years ago but never though of getting rid of WinPatrol!also Steve Bass gave you a great write-up in his lastWeekly Newsletter

I was a Norton Utilities fan when it was a DOS application. Once Symantec bought it, they killed it. Every time I've tried to return to Symantec, I've been VERY sorry. My most recent stupidity was Norton Internet Security Suite. I got it, free, after a rebate. You get what you pay for! I had to re-install the OS after installing. I absolutely HATE Symantec products. I would rather risk no firewall or antivirus then to install ANY Symantec products. Shame on Symantec!!!

This may not be the way you want to go, but although I am not a lawyer, their comment about winpatrol being a virus strikes me as both libelous and defamatory. It strikes me that even if you didn't want to sue them, it does give you leverage to tell them to cease the practice.

I put Norton 360 on my desktop PC (running XP). Shortly thereafter, I noticed that Windows Explorer began always CRASHING whenever I tried to some some complex task like MOVE a file...or RENAME a file. Y'know, really complex stuff (haha). I was on the phone with Dell for a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened to Explorer, and Dell could not figure it out at all. They finally said I may need to wipe my C: drive, re-install the operating system, and go from there. Then I told the tech, y'know, the first time I had this happen was shorly after installing NORTON 360. So we uninstalled the NORTON program...WOW!!! WINDOWS WA FIXED!!! Then we re-installed Nortin 360... EXPLORER FROZE AGAIN!! I tried to get my money back fro Norton. NO DEAL. (You know who will NEVER AGAIN ever buy a NORTON product!